Sunday, 31 July 2011. Or, “The Day we Macaroned to Victory”

I’d like to own that my first macaron attempt looked like this:

<<shudder>>.

Today would be different. Give me macarons or give me death!

It started like this:

Because of this:

Lookin’ good!:

Except Batch 1 did this:

Ookie. (at least it made feet):

So the team mobilised:

as Ivan made fresh pasta (baking is hard work):

Andrea set the table (*gorgeous* place!):

I pondered Batch 2′s cracks (verdict: underbaked):

and we rallied around the VICTORY frosting, either moving too fast to be caught on film or *after* a bottle of vinho verde… (spoiler: it was a *really* good wine…):

loverly!:

With the miracle of Batch 3… (perfeito!):

…and some of the darkest chocolate cupcakes (oh! And a little bubbly? Don’t mind if I do…), we’re foreshadowing triumph:

Andrea piped for Canada:

(and, actually, she hoped it was for the pleasure of Brazil):

Our efforts begat fabulosity:

and Ivan, as the representative of Team Brazil, declared it a win:

With that, I proclaim the month of July CLOSED. On a high note!

What are your August plans? I’m going to Machu Picchu. And the gym. But not in that order.

I’m a non-conformist by nature. I taught on St-Patrick’s Day in black… but my next class, I wore my green blazer. It’s just how I roll.

I don’t WIAW because I think you might die of boredom looking at what I eat all day… I don’t Chuck Taylor Tuesday ’cause I only just learned that Chuck Taylors are Converse, and I don’t have any… and I generally even eschew most of the more popular blogs for the lesser-known gems. What can I say? I just like to go my own way.

Today, however, call me a joiner: Lindsay posted her 10 Meaningful Snapshots, and I was excited. Lindsay said it like this: These pictures say “I don’t have my fancy camera but I must capture this moment ASAP!” and I would add to that that I’m camera shy—literally, I feel shy bringing out my camera, so I miss great opportunities all the time. I’m trying to get over that—but that’s just me being lame and worrying about what people think.

Until that day, I had fun reliving my camera pics… the best part is that one comes is actually totally relevant to my Brazilian life… so this is actually maybe a “before” and “after” post… read on, if you can stand it!

Best. Drive. Ever. From PG to Calgary, I get to go past the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, Mount Robson. And it *never* gets old. I’m happy in São Paulo, but I love and miss BC!!

This little beauty is Dolli, who I used to dog-sit in Calgary. She’s not allowed on the couch. Ahem. But who can say no to that *face*?!?

Picture this: September, 2009. On a research trip in Paris. Thanks to a grant, my hotel is in my beloved 6th arrondissement. Thanks to jetlag, I’m actually up for a run at 6.30am. After 45 minutes, I stop for a breather, and realise I’m RIGHT.NEXT. to. Nôtre Dame. Just wow.

Today, in SP’s “winter”, it was 27 degrees. In PG’s winter, the only “27″ we saw had a minus in front of it. But that didn’t stop me! Cross-country skiing is an addiction. It was -31°C one fine day when I went out and did the big climbs with the best downhill sections. After 90 minutes, I was starting to feel a chill, but I was also euphoric… and looking not unlike a snowbeast. There’s frost on my eyelashes, my eyebrows, my glasses, in my hair, on my hat… oh, the good times!

For a little contrast, it was July. It was the Rocky Mountains. It was a hot day… but happily, in the distance, there’s also a glaciar. And they’re receding SO fast it’s terrifying, so hug the planet today!

After the trauma of my Comprehensive exams in my PhD, I spent a week staring at the walls… and sometimes, doing an oil paint by number—replicating the Master’s work, in every way possible. It was Christmas, 2004. When I moved to PG in 2007, I was still too attached to this to let it go… so it went into storage in Calgary. I cleaned that storage out before coming to SP, and finally felt strong enough to chuck it. A shame, I think. It might have been worth something someday. An iPhone photo is all that’s left of it…

OHMYGOD. *I* was in the presence of THE Tool Guys’ van from Outrageous Fortune.

Auckland Museum, December 2010.

Yeah.

This is my phone’s wallpaper. For a year, which is a record for me. It’s the view from Eagle Harbour beach, West Van. And I like to pretend that one day I’ll have $2,000,000 to drop on a house and I’ll live there. Until then, I have this picture.

Oh, a little cheat here… during the “I have no camera” era, I took this and posted it. It was… I think around the Ides of March. It’s my first cheesecake. Sure, it cracked, but I still think it’s pretty!

Do you know what this is?

If you said “a shoe”, well, points for literality, but you were actually right only if you said “a cautionary tale”.

I… don’t make decisions involving money quickly. I circle the grocery store repeatedly to figure out if my impulse purchase is going to lead to remorse, and half the time I’ll leave without it after my circles. In the case of these shoes, I needed new black heels. I liked these ones, but I was trying to be frugal. So I thought on it for awhile, and “awhile” was just too long: DENIED. I like to call these, the ones that got away…

Now, careful reflection is a good trait when trying to be financially responsible, but I keep this pic as a cautionary tale because, hey man, you gotta just commit sometimes, you know?

So to try to practice commitment, I signed up for Groupon. The old me DOES NOT make decisions in a day! ARE YOU KIDDING?!? But the experiment was bust, in a sense, because the Calgary Groupon offers me nothing I feel like I can’t live without—coffee? I’ll buy it anyway. Manicure? SP has ruined me for that. An overnight mountain cabin stay for 2? Well, sounds good, but the Rockies aren’t going anywhere, and all my Canadian friends are having babies THIS WEEKEND, so I have trouble finding a plus one who’s free these days… so: I’m still a conservative spender.

Making my experiment more relevant, I have ALSO signed up for the São Paulo Groupon, and this one is just freaking TORTURING me… Do you know what it’s sent my way in the last 10 days? Buenos Aires.

As in, Argentina.

At 50% price.

Luckily (?), I didn’t even fret about this one—Marcella was there a few months ago, and in her words, “it’s freezing there now, anyway”. (Er, average temperatures these days are between 6 and 11°C, so “freezing” is a relative measure…). Still: I knew she wouldn’t be up for it.

But then came Machu Picchu. Oh, my. I began pressuring Marcella… however, neither of us was going to commit in a day. Though I thought about it… which I considered progress.

And then the next day… was Machu Picchu again. It seemed like a sign. The universe was conspiring. I harassed Marcella by email at work… and long story short, we didn’t take it.

What we did to was take Marcella’s crazy-ass air miles, book flights, and then plan our OWN trip to Machu Picchu, thank you very much. And it’s all going to happen in less than a month.

I owe it all to a pair of shoes.

Are you spendy or spendthrifty? And tag, you’re it: your 10 fave camera pics?

It’s 4.47 am as I begin writing this. I have just submitted my article. I LOVE THAT. I’ll still have edits after the peer review, but the worst is over. Squeee!

So let’s focus on the love first—and sorry to burst your bubbles, but it’s not romantic. Brazilian men can be quite pleasing to the eye, but it’s not *that* kind of post…

Here’s my big 5 Loves for the last week, in no particular order:

1) It was almost exactly a year ago that I happened upon HEAB, which I was thinking about the other day because I realised that I MISS PROTEIN ICE CREAM. I love protein ice cream. So I re-watched Heather’s video, and if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend—especially the part where she puts a cushion in front of her pregnant belly so Summer, from inside, wouldn’t lose her hearing because of the VitaMix. Pretty much too cute for words.

(In the absence of protein ice cream, I consoled myself with “Yogoberry” at the mall last night—Brazil’s answer to the fro-yo craze. I had mine with oreo bits, Marcella with… condensed milk. Spot the Brazilian!)

2) thanks to Lindsay, for this brilliant idea: I am new to and loving baked chickpeas. With a dusting of cinnamon, Lindsay recommended them in yogurt. And it’s delicious. Then I started having them with cold milk and my bran sticks (or with oatmeal and flax and unsweetened yogurt, whatev) as if they were breakfast cereal, and it reminded me of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal from my youth… only not quite so artificial. Crunchy, sugarless-but-still sweetish goodness in a bowl.

3) I’ve been hanging out with an old high school friend who married a Paulista and the blast-from-the-past has been so much fun… that it’s made me nostalgic! High school was the 90s for me, so I went back and started watching that 90s icon of ass-kickery and fantasy mayhem: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Forget Angel, I’m totally Team Oz. (source)

4) This past Sunday was the last of the Campos do Jordão music festival I’ve been loving so much… and this final concert was in São Paulo. After a phenomenal performance by a youth orchestra, the pianist played as his encore Débussy’s “Claire de Lune“. To hear it live, played to perfection on a beautiful instrument… I never imagined I would get a chance in my lifetime. It was unreal. (OK, this photo is from last weekend during their rehearsal with the opera singer (!!), because this weekend’s photos were all blurry… go with it. The conductor’s smile says it all… “yep. She’s *that* good!”)

5) When does 16 days = 40? When Puff Mei comes EARLY!!! Just when my bed had sprung a slow leak that was getting… less slow with each day, THE COUCH ARRIVED! I’ve slept on it once, it’s hella firm, and it changes the room *completely*. Let’s check out before

and after:

It’s like it’s a real room now!

What are you lovin’ this week?

Now: back to the gym!

I told Carol I preferred free weights to machines… it’s just more “real world” to me. But we were chatting up a storm and she forgot until we were almost finished and then she said “oh, that’s not right”. Well, I wasn’t going to complain, really… I would have just gone rogue later.

Here’s an interesting point for you: the magic number is 16.

Every gym I’ve ever been to says, “it’s 8-12 reps”. Not here—when I get to 16, it’s time to raise the weight. Hm.

Here’s another interesting point for you: going rogue would have been bad.

My gym, as I said before, promises results. This is where the five meetings come in: they test you medically (#1), they give you a weight program (#2), they make sure you’re doing it right (#3), they look at your diet and nutrition (#4), and they follow up with you at the end to see how you’ve progressed.

And along the way, you fill in your workout sheet each day, and it gets checked by staff… and they interact with you regularly as you work out (even the foreigner no one can talk to gets smiles, thumbs ups, and “tudo bem?”), but even if it sounds sorta Big Brother, it’s all very friendly. Judgement-free.

That means that they watch to see that you’re following the chosen path—so had I gone rogue, I’d have been breaking the rules. That just means that I wouldn’t have been eligible for “guaranteed results”, but it’s not like I was aiming to fail and get my money back: I wanted the fitness!

When Carol realised that we hadn’t given me free weights, she said, “come back Monday and we’ll do a new one”. Just like that, I was getting a freebie! That’s Brazilian service… but I ended up working through the “casual drop by” I’d been offered so we turned my “review” on that Thursday into my free weights program.

So my path to health, cardiovascular improvement, and increased muscle mass (my three stated goals, with the added benefit of leading to number 4: weight loss so that my cholesterol is kicked back in line), was paved with this:

1) Smith machine squats: 3 sets, up to 16 reps [they all are, let's leave this out], 5 kg plates

2) Dumbbell bench press: 2 sets, 9kg

3) Seated row: 2 sets, 28 kg

4) Skull crushers: 2 sets, 8kg

5) Lateral raises: 2 sets, 3kg

6) Distinctly Brazilian Don’t Know What to Call This: I strap an 8kg ankle weight on. I stand on the bench in front of the bench press machine. I drop one leg off the bench and bend the knee on the bench. It’s like a squat, but not. And it’s bloody hard. 2 sets.

7) Bosu ball sit-ups: 3 sets, as many as I can

8 ) Back raises: 3 sets, as many as I can.

Right now, I like it. And if I do it three times a week (their recommendation), I get a new program in another 3 weeks. Which is good, because I’m wishing I could do more “muscle confusion”.

Tomorrow is appointment 4: the nutritional consult. I don’t know if it’s actually with a nutritionist, and I know where my weaknesses lie… but knowing and doing are different things.

OK! This post took me 41 hours to write. Is that normal? I still want to hear what you’re loving this week!

Oi, blogosphere, tudo bem?

I’ve spent my waking hours—almost all of them—since we got back from Campos last weekend in the service of a profession that I realise I was right to leave. Well, it left me, but I’M SO GLAD IT DID! I really truly love the material, but the demands are madness. I think I’ve gained 5 lbs because in my misery of stress and pushing the deadline, I ate sugar. And I didn’t leave the house. This was a bad week that way.

BUT: thanks to an all-nighter on Wednesday (double-you tea eff, I’m too old for that), I wrote about 4,000 words in 30 hours, and thought I finished the article… and then, I went to submit it and realised that I had screwed up the length of a variety of sections and it was going to be rejected, so now, I’m editing. Which is still a whole heckuva lot better than first-drafting. And I wish it was done already, but then they said “it’s more important that you do your editorial duties rather than submitter duties”, so I switched priorities and: wham! Another almost all-nighter last night (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). I’m starting to feel like the floor of a taxi cab. PS: I miss the Ghostbusters, don’t you? (Points to whoever remembers who said that without having to Google it.)

So now that I’m well over a week late with this post, I want to tell you about the gym. But that’s going to be text-heavy, so I’m breaking it up in a few posts, and even with that this is still crazy long so HAVE A BATHROOM BREAK NOW, BEFORE YOU START READING.

And then I also have to have a holla for Wednesday last, which, as 20 July was both my one monthiversary of being in Brazil, and also the anniversary of the 20th of July conspiracy plot to kill Hitler. Didn’t work, but props for the (partial) effort, boys. And that concludes the part of today where I’m a stodgy old historian, I swear. But as proof that I was actually not 100% stodgy, and kinda concerned with keeping my students’ attention in lectures, this Lego virgin of Stauffenberg was in my PowerPoint to pep up my lectures. Heh. Please don’t be offended at all, I just liked to tell jokes where I could in serious material—usually in ways that were only absurd, to emphasise that it was a joke. Like with this—seriously: the real Stauffenberg was blond!! So not funny that it’s funny, right? No? OK, moving on, then.

MY GYM—

Chapter 1: “In the beginning, there was Bio-Ritmo”

Best money I’ve ever spent, let me tell you. This whole process is very cool, and the name of this game is, “I will never see such good service at a gym again“. Let’s start at the beginning:

Last Thursday I had my medical evaluation and first appointment–that’s first and second of FIVE (!!) appointments. The night before, Marcella and I realised that they were both *earlier* than Dante—the English-speaking guy—started working. Well! I was just going to have to bring my dictionary and make the best of it.

I showed up. I gave them my best “não falo portugués“, while also brandishing my appointment card so we’d be speaking the same language, yet without in any way actually speaking the same language. STILL, the guy at the desk just looked at me (and the three horns CLEARLY growing out of my head), and called a woman over. She looked at me, and said, “I’m Carol. I don’t speak as good as Dante, but I can help.” Awesome. I was set.

She brought me to the doctor and as we waited we talked body image a bit. She’s a tall and thin sort and said she was sorry she didn’t have a big bum like they like in Brazil. I love this place. We talked about how people do dangerous and stupid things to try to fit those images when it’s not natural for them. You have to live, right?

She said, “have you had pão de queijo [Brazilian cheesy bread, recipe forthcoming!]?” OF COURSE I HAVE! and then “I can’t believe they don’t have that in *every* country!” Too true! And if you’re being a slave to an impossible aesthetic and live a pão de queijo–free life, are you living at all?? We bonded instantly. I thought Carol was great.

The doctor, (“Silvia. In Brazil we always use first names for everything”), was *also* great, and also spoke English (so there, Dante!). She took my blood pressure and pulse (really good and really bad, respectively—totally normal for me, unfortunately), and then she hooked me up to a bunch of monitors and got me on the treadmill. This phase involved me being shirtless… and walking up an incline. Then, Silvia cranked the speed and I was shirtless… and *running*… while I’m a touch gorda. I only felt bad for her. But it all came out in the wash: I was wearing my koru necklace from NZ (like that one (source), but in hematite), and at the end of our meeting she got excited and said, “I normally wouldn’t show you this, but LOOK AT MY TATTOO!” while pulling up her left pantleg, showing a HUGE Maori-style tattoo covering most of her calf… instant bonding! She’s a gym-user too and said, “any time you need anything, please just ask me!”

So at that point, of the people at the gym who had actually spoken to me, I was 3 for 3 with beyond-amazing service. I felt better about paying exorbitantly for membership.

And then Carolina came to collect me… and *that* is when the weighing, the measurement, the goal discussion, and the status-quo taking took place. Meeting two of five.

(I avoid weighing myself because I fixate on numbers and then either overly restrict or self-sabotage.) When it came time for the scale, I just said, “if I’m over X, I don’t want to know.” I got on the scale. There was a pause… and she said “oh”. And I laughed.

Well, that’s OK—gorrrrrrrrrrrda—FINALLY I had the time and inclination to fix it. How many times have I made goals and plans to get healthy on this blog? I can’t even guess. At least 7. But this is actually different. Mark my words!

She took my measurements (source). I went to my happy place. We did waist, hips, each thigh, and arms. Strangely, not a chest measurement, but I suppose so many people have implants here that it’s kinda bogus.

We did a flexibility text (the sit and reach past your toes—three times), and my flexibility was good. Not so good that I love me a downward dog or anything, but I rise to testing occasions.

Loving the gym some more—-the next part of this evaluation was about my FEELINGS.

How is my self-esteem? Am I confident? How does going to the gym make me feel? I rated all these (and more) on a scale of “good / bad” or “yes /no”, and we talked about the plan I had in front of me. I stated that my goals were three things… related to my gorda-osity, but not directly

The thing about my weight is, if I’m over the weight that I’m most comfortable at, that’s when my cholesterol is bad. I’ve played this game enough that I don’t even need to have the blood test to prove it—and I’m not in a tizzy about it because I know from experience that I can fix it.

In some ways, when I snuck a look at my weight on the sheets Carolina was filling out, it was a good wake-up call: shur, I would like to like the way my clothes fit, but more than that, I don’t want Lipitor.

And that gave me the awesomest shot-in-the arm. Hooray for motivation!

I can do this. And not only that, I already *am*. I’ve done it before—this is my 28th birthday picture, when I had *just* found out I had my cholesterol record:

A bit out of focus because it’s a self-portrait, and it can be hard to focus using the timer…

And this is 4 months later—forgiving the asinine expression on my face, because as I’ve said before, I’m not photogenic and I avoid pictures, but I had just got the BIGGEST CHEQUE OF MY LIFE and I took a dorky “woo-woo” photo to send to one of my sisters:

Do you see the difference? It’s about 17lbs, 1 chin, 2 dress sizes, cardiovascular endurance, muscle mass, AND a fraction of the BAD cholesterol. Do you also see the running cheetah border in the house I was renting? Underneath that was leopard print wallpaper. I DIDN’T DECORATE.

So in the end, there was light. And now, different me, different year, different *continent*, but I’m going to kill this thing.

Did I mention that my gym guarantees results?

More next time—on goals and weight programs—and more briefly.